The Beginners External Graphics Card Setup Guide For Mac
Graphics Card (GPU) based render engines such as Redhift3D, Octane or VRAY-RT have matured quite a bit over the last years and are starting to overtake CPU-based Render-Engines. But what hardware gives the best-bang-for-the-buck and what do you have to keep in mind when building your GPU-Workstation compared to a Workstation? Can be somewhat straightforward, but highly optimizing for GPU Rendering is a whole other story. So what is the best Hardware and best GPU for rendering with Octane, Redhsift3D or VRAY-RT, that also is affordable?
Let’s take a look: Processor Since GPU-Render Engines use the GPU to render, technically you should go for a max-core-clock CPU like the Intel i7 8700K that clocks at 3,7GHz (4,7Ghz Turbo) or the Intel i7 8086K that clocks at 4Ghz (5Ghz Turbo). That said though, there is another factor to consider when choosing a CPU: PCIE-Lanes.
GPUs are attached to the CPU via PCIE-Lanes on the motherboard. Different CPUs support different amounts of PCIE-Lanes and Top-tier GPUs usually need 16x PCIE 3.0 Lanes to run at full performance. The i7 8700K/8086K have 16 PCIE-Lanes, meaning you could use only one GPU at full speed with these type of CPUs. If you want more than one GPU at full speed you would need a different CPU that supports more PCIE-Lanes like the AMD Threadripper CPUs, that have 64 PCIE-Lanes, the i9 7800X (28 PCIE-Lanes) or the i9 7900X Series CPUs that support 44 PCIE-Lanes. GPUs, though, can also run in lower speed modes such as 8x PCIE 3.0 Speeds and then also use up less PCIE-Lanes (8x).
Usually there is a negligible difference in Rendering Speed when having GPUs run in 8x mode instead of 16x mode. This would mean you could run 2x GPUs on an i7 8700K in 8x PCIE mode, 3x GPUs on an i9 7800X and 5x GPUs on an i9 7900X. (Given the Mainboard supports this configuration) High PCIE-Lanes CPUs are usually also as they tend to have more cores. When actively rendering and your scene has been loaded into the GPU VRAM, it fits nicely in there and nothing has to be swapped out of core, GPU renderers are of course mainly dependent on GPU performance. Some processes though that happen before and during rendering rely heavily on the performance of the CPU, Hard-Drive and network. For example extracting and preparing Mesh Data to be used by the GPU, loading textures from your Hard-Drive and preparing the scene data. In very complex scenes, these processing stages will take lots of time and can bottleneck the overall rendering speed, if a low-end CPU, Disk and RAM are employed.
If your scene is too large for your GPU memory, the GPU renderer will need to access your System RAM or even swap to disk, which will considerably slow down the rendering. Best Graphics Card for Rendering To use Octane and Redshift you will need a GPU that has CUDA-Cores, meaning you will need a NVIDIA GPU. VRAY-RT additionally supports OpenCL meaning you could use an AMD card here. The best bang-for-the-buck NVIDIA cards are 1070 GTX (1920 Cuda CUDA, 8GB VRAM), 1080 GTX (2560 CUDA Cores, 8GB VRAM) and the 1080 Ti (3584 CUDA Cores, 11GB VRAM).
On the high-end, the currently highest possible performance is offered by the NVIDIA Quadro P6000, that also comes with 24GB of Video RAM. This Card though has horrible Performance per Dollar (Check the tables further down). NVIDIAs new Volta architecture, that is being released for consumers soon, will top this performance even more.
Note though, that the Render Engines you are using will have to be updated in Order to use the New CUDA 9 Architecture these Volta Cards run on. GPUs, that have 12GB Video RAM and more, can handle high-poly scenes with over 200 million unique objects best. Take a look at the performance per dollar tables below, though, to get an overview of how expensive some of these cards can get without offering that much more performance. 0,405 Source: Speed up your Multi-GPU Rendertimes So unfortunately GPUs don’t scale linearly. 2 GPUs render an Image about 1,8 times faster. Having 4 GPUs will only render about 3x faster.
This is quite a bummer, isn’t it? Having multiple GPUs communicate with each other to render the same task, costs so much performance, that one GPU in a 4-GPU rig is basically just managing decisions. The solution is the following: When final rendering image sequences, use as few GPUs as possible per task.
If you have to render 4 images and have 4 GPUs, let every GPU render one image instead of having 4 GPUs render on every image. This way you will not encounter any slow-down. Some 3D-Software might have this feature built-in, if not, it is best to use some kind of Render Manager, such as Thinkbox Deadline (Free for up to 2 Nodes/Computers). Beware though, that you might have to increase your System RAM a bit and have a strong CPU, since every GPU-Task needs its amount of RAM and CPU performance. Buying GPUs NVIDIA and AMD GPUs are both hard to get by for a reasonable price nowadays, since mining is so popular. Graphics Cards are mostly Out of Stock and even when they are available, they are nowhere near MSRP. There is a site called that gives you an overview of the most popular places to buy GPUs in your country, and notifies you as soon as cards are available.
I put together some for you to get a head start in configuring your own dream-build. Octane Another thing I am asked often is if one should go with Redshift or Octane. As I myself have used both extensively, in my experience, thanks to the Shader Graph Editor and the vast Multi-Pass Manager of Redshift, I like to use Redshift more for doing work that needs complex Material Setups and heavy Compositing. Octane is great if you want results fast, as it is slightly easier to learn for beginners.
But this of course is a personal opinion and I would love to hear yours! What Hardware do you want to buy? Hi alex, I am an architect trying to set my configurations of 2 computers 1 for rendering of buildings and another for 3d modeling. Budget for 2 systems is 1500$ each i made 2 systems configuration, Can you please suggest me suitable motherboards and other parts for both processors? My preferences for above processors above: System1 for 3d modelling: CPU: Intel i7 8086k CPU cooler:?
Motherboard (suggest the model) with PCIE slots = 2 Ram Slots = 4 Memory (RAM): 1 X 16GB DDR4 4166 or 2133 (suggest model) storage: PCIE M2 SSD Samsung 970 EVO (500 GB) GPU: NVidia GTX 1070 (2gb) Case: Please suggest Power supply: Please suggest for this System2 for Rendering: CPU: AMD threadripper 1900X CPU cooler:? Motherboard (suggest the model) with PCIE slots = 2 Ram Slots = 4 Memory (RAM): 1 X 16GB DDR4 4166 or 2133 (suggest model) storage: PCIE M2 SSD Samsung 970 EVO (500 GB) GPU: NVidia GTX 1070 (2gb) Case: Please suggest Power supply: Please suggest for this. Hey Vikram, Go take a look at finished builds in this Article here: (towards the end) You can use those builds as base and tweak them until they fit into your budget. LGA 1151 CPU Cooler would be something like the bequiet dark rock 4.
Be sure to get 2x8gb of ram and not just one stick, as they then run in dual mode. No need to get 4266mhz, unless you wan to overclock. Plain old 2400mhz or so will do just fine and save you some cash. The Nvidia 1070 is 8GB VRAM, where did you find the 2GB info? The rest of your questions I hope should be answered when you read the article above 🙂 Cheers, Alex. Hey Alex Thank you so much for this article! I want to use Cinema 4D with Redshift from now on with the following setup (Work and Renderstation): Worksstation: CPU: Intel i9-9900K (LGA 1151, 3.60GHz, Unlocked) GPU: NVIDIAGTX 1060 6GB or NVIDIAGTX 1070 Ti 6GB RAM: 32 GB Kingston Value RAM, 2666MHz MAINBOARD: ASUS Prime Z370-A HD: Samsung 970 PRO/EVO 1TB Renderstation: GPU: 4x NVIDIA 1070 GTX 8GB VRAM PCI-E x16 CPU: Intel Core i9-7900X (LGA 2066, 3.30GHz, Unlocked) MAINBOARD: Asus WS X299 Sage (RAM, HD, Case, Power Supply, Cooling is to be defined) My questions: — What do you think about this setup?
— With the amount of the PCIE Lanes of this setup (CPU 44 PCI-E lanes) and the plx-chips on the mainboards: Is it possible to use 4 (up to 7) GPUS, am I right? Hi Lucas, Yes these are excellent builds. With the Asus Sage Mainboard you really can use up to the amount of gpus that fit onto the mainboard, though you should check in what speeds they will run when fully utilized. Of course these slots are single spaced, so note that you can’t use 7x dual slot gpus without riser cables. It is usually recommended to get twice the amount of RAM to VRAM. So your 7x 8gb x2 ultimately you should have around 128gb of RAM. Note though, that GPU rendering is also very straining on the cpu and the more gpus the more the cpu is utilized.
Even with in one of my rigs with 4x 1080ti the cpu is often utilized at around 70%-80& in Redshift/c4d on a Threadripper 1900x. It depends heavily on the type of scenes you render, that is for sure. If you plan on using a rendermanager and split your tasks up onto 1 gpu / per task, then this strains the cpu even more and will most definitely not work, just a heads up. Even splitting up 2gpus / task on a 4 gpu system gives some frame errors sometimes I have found.
Oh and having 7x GPUs you should think about where all of the heat will go. 🙂 Let me know what you think, Cheers, Alex. Hi I am a miner and 3D Generalist. Since mining is not profitable as it used to be I want to switch my mining rig into a rendering rig(s). I have 19 GPUs 2x 64 vegas, 5x 56vegas 12x, 580 RX nitro’s. All AMD cards.
I am hoping if you can tell me exactly what motherboard(s) and processers(s) to buy that will support the maximum amount of cards on each motherboard. I use MAYA/3ds max with VRAY.
Currently, for mining I have 2x Biostar 250 pro motherboard(s) this supports up to 12 GPUs with riser cables. Is that something I can re-use. What would you recommend?
Hey Sheraz, As far as I know your Mainboard only supports a bunch of x1 pcie slots. When GPU Rendering though, you should have the gpus run at x8 at a minimum. Also the CPU should support as many pcie-lanes as possible. Your current CPU (LGA1151) will only support 16x pcie lanes to the gpus, so supporting 2x x8 at max. If you want to get the maximum out of the cards you have i’d get a ASUS WS X299 Sage that supports 7x x8 pcie gpus. You’ll have to get some new 2066 socket cpus though and maybe more ram, depending on what you have right now.
32gb per node should be good. Cheers, Alex. Hey Jerrod, The 1070 and 2070 often surpass the 1080/2080 in the VRAY GPU Benchmark, and have a much much better price/performance ratio.
I am not quite sure why the 2070 and 1070 perform so well compared to the 1080 / 2080 but the benchmark results speak for themselves. It could of course very well be, that the benchmark scene is just not that great, and having the cards run in real-world scenes will result in different performances, but usually this benchmark gets pretty close to the real thing.
In Octane or Redshift the cards scale better, but vray gpu seems to like the xx70 series very much! Cheers, Alex.
Hi Alex, I have built pc with i7 8700k gtx1070 and 16gb ram. Right now I’m using standart render engine on C4D which is cpu based. Would it make a change in render time if I used a gpu based render engine such as Octane with my current setup? I know gpu renders are better with multiple graphic cards but having a single 1070, is it going to be faster than cpu rendering?
How much change would it make to add a second 1070? Is there a way to compare cpu vs gpu render time according to my setup? Hey Umut, Because GPU and CPU Render Engines are quite different from each other and normally one can’t render the scene input of the other, it is difficult to compare these two. In GPU Render engines a huge advantage that you have is the nature of the Render Engine. It usually gives you immediate render updates, so you don’t have to wait for a few minutes to see how your change has affected the scene, but you get an immediate (lower quality) preview of the later final render. This lets you work more efficiently and lets you iterate much more often, which usually increases the quality of the final outcome a good bit. If you had to compare GPU to CPU I would say the 1070 is about on the same level as an i7 8700K performance-wise, maybe even a bit faster.
Adding a second 1070 will give you nearly 2x the performance. Hope this helps, Alex. Hi Alex, Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Thanks to you I understand a lot more of computers know. I built a workstation a while ago with the help of your website.
Octane runs very fast and I’m happy but the screen freezes often. And sometimes the screen gets black for a second (Screen losing very short the signal but in normal use, not while rendering, maybe weak power supply?). Now I thought, maybe I did something wrong with the hardware: 4 x ASUS TURBO GTX1080 Ti 11GB GDDR5X Intel Core i7 6850K (LGA 2011-v3, 3.60GHz, Unlocked) 4x Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x 2 Set, 16GB, DDR4-3200, DIMM 288) ASUS X99-E WS/3.1, CEB, LGA2011-v3 (LGA 2011-v3, Intel X99, SSI CEB) (x16/x16, x16/x16/x16, x16/x16/x16/x16) (Do this work in x16/x8/x8/x8 or not?
Maybe this is a mistake?) Dark Power Pro 11 1200 W (Maybe to weak?) Did i something wrong? And is it possible to replace the CPU with one it’s a bit better for simulations in my case? Thanks for your help! Best regards from Switzerland Andreas. Hey Andreas, When I put your specs into a PSU Wattage calculator, it shows me you will need about 1196 Watts. So it can very well be that the 1200W PSU is not enough. Easy to test this though, just take a few GPUs out and work on the Computer for a few days and see if the problem persists.
The Screen going black though doesnt sound like PSU issues to me. Maybe a cable or plug not all the way in. Test with different monitor, less GPUs, other GPU as the display driver. Check with GPU-Z if your Cards are too hot.
Newest GPU Drivers, and maybe try with a clean install. (On a different Drive if you have one lying around) 6850K has 40 pcielanes and the Mainboard has some kind of PLX chips, so a Quad GPU 16x support is there. (It says so in the manual) What type of workloads to you have in Simulations? Are you using realflow? Cheers, Alex. Hi Alex, thank you so much for all this info.
I am a Vray user and recently have decided to make an upgrade to my old pc but I’m thinking this time to start using gpus for rendering old pc config: -i7 5820k 3.3GHz -MSI X99S MPOWER (MS-7885) -Crucial Ram 32gb 4×8 ddr4-2400 -Quadro 2000 1gb -Tesla c2075 6gb -PSU Corsair 850W I’m thinking to add 2xGTX 1080 Ti with the existing PSU or 3x (3x maximum for this mboard) with a bigger PSU and save some money of the total budget buying software, extra storage and a new 4k monitor I’m still confused about the set up of the gpus. If I stacked 2 gpus will I take double the amount of Vram and if so should I buy an sli 2way for this? Works also for 3 and 4? At the end of the day you think this setup worth it for the time or should I make a new one with AMD Threadripper? Hey Antonios, Yes you can stack 2 or more GPUs, each in its own pcie slot. The render speed will double with two, near triple with three and so on.
The VRAM does not stack though unless you use NVLINK that actually doesn’t seem to be working on most of the apps. You will have to consider, that gpus have pcie-lanes that are responsible for transferring data from the gpu to the cpu.
And the different CPUs have a certain amount of pcie-lanes available. If you need too many pcie-lanes for your gpus then the cards will become slower. So the i7 8700k for example has 16 pcie-lanes for gpus.
If you have two gpus, each gets 8 lanes. If you want more gpus you will need a cpu that has more pcie-lanes available such as a Threadripper. It has 64 PCIE-Lanes. You could have 4 GPUs running and each would have 16 pcie-lanes to use.
(Though such Mainboards almost don’t exist) To make it easier (since it can be quite complicated) go check out the 3d Rendering Builds at the end of this Article here. They are ready to go and the parts work nicely together: Cheers, Alex. Hi Alex, Amazing source of knowledge, thanks!
I’m putting together a PC (moving from Mac) built for C4D, Octane & Redshift, AE and a little bit Houdini. The problem is obviously CPU. I decided to go the highest clock possible and low cores (not ideal for Houdini) but at the same time wanna keep PCI lanes’ number high. I was thinking that Intel Core i9-7900X 3.30 GHz LGA 2066 will be a good compromise between fast viewport (3.3 GHz / 4.3 GHz and a decent amount of PCI lanes (44). What do you think?
Here’s complete build: Corsair CC-9011030-WW Carbide Series Air 540 ATX ASUS WS X299 SAGE Intel X299 DDR4 S-ATA 600 Intel Core i9-7900X 3.30 GHz LGA 2066 NZXT Kraken X62 (280mm) Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB V-NAND M.2 PCI Corsair CMK32GX4M2A2400C16 Vengeance LPX 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4 2400 MHz XMP 2.0 EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 HYBRID GAMING, 11GB GDDR5X, HYBRID (start with one and scale up to 4 over time — budget thing) BenQ PD3200U 32 inch. At first, I want to tell you many thanks for source!
I found a lot of useful information. All time i worked on laptops and now i want to buy realy good workstation for After Effects, Cinema 4D, Octan, Redshift. I try to find compromise between good speed in viewport and not bad rendering in octan with maybe 3 or 4 GTX 1070ti or 1080. I understood that its almost impossible, and i should choose between viewport or rander, but maybe you can advice some options? My budget about 4000 usd. I need your advice about CPU, GPU, MoBo and cooling fort that. Many thanks for advance!
The Beginners External Graphics Card Setup Guide For Mac Windows 10
Sorry for my English) it not my native language). Hi, Alex I’ve been using octane on a laptop with 16gb ram and a 1050 ti and i’ve decided to upgrade too a proper set up since rendering is taking forever. Now i’ve asked a friend whom knows a bit more about pc building and he gave me a list of parts to get. However he’s not very knowledged in good render pc’s so i’d like to ask you if there’s anything is could/should change to this list.
AMD Ryzen 7 1700x Bitfenix ENSO case black Bitfenix Spectre Pro RGB 120 fan Corsair Builder CX 850M Power G.skill DDR4 Fortis 2x16gb 2400Mhz Ram MSI x370 GAMING PRO CARBON Motherboard Samsung 970 Evo 250GB SSD Seagate HDD 3.5 4tb HDD VGA Gigabyte Geforce GTX 1080 Windforce OC 2x graphics card Thanks in advance! Hi Alex Thanks for this post. I am currently teetering on getting a single slave or just upgrading my current machine (4700K + 1080Ti + 1070Ti, 32GB Ram) for use with GPU rendering in Max with either Vray RT or Redshift. A second machine would free up my main machine when rendering in the day but has the added cost. So not decided which way to go on that front yet. Anyway, my question. I need a motherboard / CPU that can scale with my work demands so looking for a CPU + Motherboard that can take 4 GPU’s but initially will only use 2.
Any recommendations on current MBrd/CPU combo hardware available today? Or is the Sage still a good choice? Hey Geoff, Actually I am currently looking into this myself.
Using a fast Computer to work on (high-core-clock) but need a high PCIE-Lanes CPU to render on, getting a second PC is somewhat inevitable. I think the best choice currently is the Threadripper 1900X that has 64 PCIE-Lanes and together with (for example) the MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon can take on 4 GPUs (2 in 16x Mode and 2 in 8x Mode). The TR4 Socket will also support upcoming Threadripper generations, so a big plus in terms of upgradeability. The Sage is interesting when using Intel CPUs, since the Intel CPUs have less PCIE Lanes. But with Threadripper you don’t have this problem anymore. And running GPUs on 8x does not make a difference to 16x.
Cheers, Alex. Enjoying all of your wonderful articles and extremely handy price/performance charts. Looking for best of both cpu/gpu worlds with high processor speed of the 8700k along with a couple 1080tis running at 8x pcie. I do mostly motion graphics using Cinema 4d and After Effects and have started using Octane as my primary 3d renderer.
Does that sounds like the perfect setup? Any other pointers if so/if not would be hugely appreciated. I guess I9 7900x could be better more cores, still 4.5 ghz turbo, and allow for more gpus. Really great article, it’s helped me a lot to start to understand whats what. I’m switching from mac to PC so I need all the help I can get!
Some of the replies here are a little bit old now so I was wondering if there have been any developments in terms of the best CPU to run 4 GPUs? Looking into it it seems like the i9-7900X is a good option and the i7-6850K is maybe even better whilst being cheaper. Is there anything else to consider between these 2 CPUs or another one that you think is currently better suited to the task?
Hello Alex, Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge. Very usefull. I would like to ask you one thing, because I’m going crazy and I’m desperate with my computer problems. I’m recently using a new computer (I bought from a company specialized in 3d work), with x4 1080ti – Windows 10 – Intel Xeon E5-1650. I’m using Cinema 4d and Octane and some weeks ago I’ve been experimenting a lot of blue screens, screen freezes, render crashes,etc. I can’t render a scene by night because always crashes. I’ve noticed in Octane forums that a lot of people have the same problems, but nobody have a strong solution.
I’m trying a lot of drivers versions, and the last method I read was to change the TDR values of the registry, changing 8s by 60s like this manual: After changing the TDR values my render don’t show “render crash” but it’s worse, because it stays frozen with no feedback So my problems persists, and I’m really desperated 1. I don’t know if it’s a hardware problem, and Octane poblem or Windows problemwhat do you think? Do you recommend me to use Windows 7?? I think it’s my last option Thank you very much.
Hey Ziee, You are absolutely right. The more Cores in a CPU the lower it usually clocks. For modeling I would recommend a high clocking (lower core-count) CPU such as the i7 8700K, but for fast rendering you will need as many cores as possible, such as a Threadripper 1950X. This truly is THE question that we all have to think about. What is more valuable for us. The time we actively work or the time it takes to render. Usually it is the time you work on stuff.
Then again, its not like you work twice as slow with a Threadripper 1900X vs a i7 8700K. Its marginally snappier, you might notice differences in a range of 5 – 10%. Tough decision, I know! Hey Adam, Look into Blower Style GPUs such as the Asus 1080 TI Turbo. These blow out heat at the back and not on to other cards. If you can swing, get watercooling or hybrid watercooling solutions.
CPU either a Threadripper or a 2066 socket type intel CPU with maximum PCIE-Lanes would be best. There is one Asus Sage WS X299 Board that has PLX chips for additional PCIE-Lanes on it. You could use four x16 cards on this one. Lots of other boards have enough pcie Sockets and Lanes for four 8x GPUs. As stated in the article, check the specification info on the manufacturers Website and it’s best to look into the manual too, to be sure! Hi Alex I recently built a 1950X machine for multiple purposes (VRay RT, AE, Premiere Pro, Audio): 1950X 1080Ti & 1080 64 GGB DDR4 The problem is that I found out now that the 1950X has some problems with the navigation in After Effects (and it has problems with an audio tool I often use). I really want to switch to a 8700K.
The only thing that held me back was the thought of not being able to render at the same speed in 3D. But after reading your post, the 8700K would be the better solution for GPU renders anyways (since I’m mainly using VRay RT), am I getting this right?
What’s your recommendation? Should I stick with the 1950X? I don’t think Adobe is going to enable Multicore on AE again soon oh and I plan to use 3 1080Ti sometime in the future.
Hey Silas, This is in fact one of the big questions in the 3D Hardware world. Get a high-clocked / low core count CPU to work fast (Good for working in c4d and ae), but CPU render slow, or get a high core count / lower clock speed CPU that usually has more pcie-lanes for more GPUs, that you might work slower on, but you can render fast on the CPU can build in more GPUs, though the many GPUs actually need a higher clock speed. In a perfect world you would have a 16 Core CPU with 4,5 GHZ on all cores, that supports 64 PCIE Lanes. Since this unfortunately is no option you have to either buy two specialized pcs (one for working and one for rendering) or think about what you will be doing the most of, what time is most valuable to you (working or rendering?). That said, yes you would be able to run your 2 GPUs on a 8700K on both 8x mode. You do have to check your Mainboard specifications though, because many Mainboards will steal PCIE Lanes for e.g. M.2 Slots or SATA Slots.
I myself have a high-clock cpu (i7 7700K) for working and am using render farms for when the projects get too big to render locally, but am thinking about getting a Threadripper for local CPU Rendering. In terms of AE Rendering after Adobe pretty much broke the Multi-Frame Rendering: A Tip is to use a render manager such as Thinkbox Deadline, that is free for up to 2 PCs. You can set it up in a way, that your pc renders multiple concurrent tasks and so utilizes all of your cores on the Threadripper. (This only works though when rendering Image sequences, not for Film/Video-Rendering) As for your future Plans 3x 1080TI: The 8700K only has 16 PCIE-Lanes, so no luck there.
You will need a i9 or Threadripper to fully utilize the GPUs. Hi Alex, I’m upgrading my workspace by building up a new render station for Redshift and Octane.
My issue is that im torn between wither going the Ryzen route or the new 79xx route. The reason being, I want to run either 3 1o8oti’s or 4 1080s at the best speed possible. Looking at the require PCIe lanes available, i need your advice or what could potentially work best and still be future proof.
I know i will get more PCIe lanes on ryzen i just havent jumped on it before. Could you recommend some ideal compatible parts for a build for redshift, specifically on the CPU and MOBO side. Im building inside a Corsair Obsidian 900D.
Alex, My system is not typical because I’ve done so much enhancement over the few years I’ve had it. And while it’s several generations older now, it still makes a good workstation for the small projects I do in 3DS Max. It’s an intel i7-4960X based system on an Asus RIVE Black Edition MoBo. 64Gigs of 2800 DDR3 Memory. Processor overclock at 4.6Ghz (under water) as well as other things overclocked on the MoBo. The graphics cards are: 1-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and 2-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080’s running x16 / x8 / x8 on the bus.
My best score on VRAY Bench is 2:28 CPU and 0:26 GPU. I want to add another 1080 Ti but I need to find a PCIe x8 riser/splitter (1 to 2 or more). MSI’s 1080 Ti card is very fat and makes it so you can’t put another card next to it on my specific MoBo. I’m not going to water-cool these things as I don’t run them that hard. I know it might be difficult, but I’d like to see a chart showing the speed differences in VRAY GPU Bench with 1 card running in a x16, x8, x4 and x1 slot compared. I really like the “Bang for the buck” approach your article features.
Again, this is very good info you don’t see everywhere. Hey Tiago, Yes, this is possible. You could just use your 1080Tis for rendering by deselcting the 1070 in the render options.
As far as I know octane, redshift and vray have this option. Or you could have the 1070 render too, but will be limited by the lesser amount of VRAM on this card, also your viewport will get sluggish, if you decide to continue working while rendering. The 1080Tis will run in headless mode (no monitor connected) meaning they will also have more VRAM free to use for the GPU Render engine.
It is interesting indeed! Unfortunately there is no CPU that satisfies all needs. You will have to make a tradeoff in some apsects.
You will have to think about what is most important for you. The tradeoff in a 8700K (or 7700K) Cpu vs a 7900X in terms of viewport performance is marginally. Considering you are thinking about getting 4 1080TIs that alone cost around 2500+$ I would look into making them run the best they can, even if you loose those 5% in Viewport Speed in heavy scenes, that you might only have rarely. I don’t think I recommend a Skylake-X mainboard anywhere but it will have to be something like the MSI X299 GAMING PRO CARBON, which has 4x PCIE x16 support.
And you could of course overclock your CPU, but you’ll have to look into decent cooling and good RAM. Then of course you could also overclock a 8700K and get even more single core speed there. There are extra Lanes for the PCH (Platform Controller Hub) that manages all the additional Hardware such as M.2, Sata, USB and so on. This means you can use the 16 Full PCIE Lanes for your GPU(s) and still have extra lanes depending on the mainboard chipset to have M.2 at full speed running (usually x4) 2.
You wont be able to run 4 x16 GPUs on a LGA 1151 Board with a i7 7700k CPU, that would require 64 PCIE Lanes. You can run them at x4 Speed, but this would reduce the speed somewhat and yes you should then switch to a 2011-3 x99 Board with a CPU that supports up to 40 PCIE Lanes.
Hey Andres, Technically you would have 3 1080 at 8x pcie speed and one at 4x pcie speed. Meaning that last card will have some speed drawbacks. That said though, adding cards does not scale the rendering performance linearly, so the last card usually will not give you an added 100% speed but less.
With more GPUs there is also a higher strain on the CPU for managing these, so I would recommend getting the 6850K that has a higher clock-speed. As for cooling, depending on your budget, you should look at either blower style cards (that stay cooler when stacked), hybrid cards (youll need lots of room in your case for mounting the radiators) or watercooling if you are up to it. What is your take on noise? 4x Founder Edition Blower style cards will be quite noisy, hybrids a bit better, and the water cooling will be the quietest.
Let me know what you think. Hey swaroop, You can, but those 4 cards will only run at 4x pcie speeds, meaning quite a decrease in speed.
Although there is almost now drawback in 16x vs 8x pcie, there unfortunately is when running the cards at 4x pcie speeds. For 4 gpus I recommend getting a i7 6850k that has 40 lanes and you will be able to rund 3x 8 pcie and one in pcie x16. Also consider getting the 1080 since they have dropped in price quite a bit recently. You could get 3x 1080 in 8x pcie and get a 6800k that has 28 pcie lanes. At current prices 4x 1070 = 1600$ and 3x 1080 =1500$.
Both combinations will have roughly the same rendering speed. Cheers, Alex.